UFC contender T.J. Grant on concussion doubters: You're idiots

TORONTO – Say what you want about T.J. Grant‘s decision to pull out of two straight UFC lightweight title fights following a concussion suffered in training. At this point, he’s heard it all.

In the past few months, Grant said, it seems like every fight fan who’s ever had a knock on the head has wanted to tell him about it.

“At first, just people questioning me like that, originally I was pretty upset,” Grant told MMAjunkie.com backstage at Saturday’s UFC 165 event. “Just like, ‘Oh yeah, suck it up.’ I actually had a couple people say things like, ‘I played football with a concussion,’ and I was just like, well, you’re an idiot.”

Grant (21-5 MMA, 8-3 UFC), on the other hand, is no fool when it comes to his brain health. Standing in the halls of Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, he shrugged off most of the dissenting opinions he’s heard from fans. People at home can think what they want, he said, but he’s the one who knows how he actually felt. The weeks and months following his concussion were bleak ones filled with bouts of nausea, headaches, fatigue, extreme light sensitivity and a frustrated fogginess he’d never felt before.

“I’m not giving up,” Grant said. “But it was significant enough that, no matter what, I wouldn’t have tried to push through it. I could just tell that it was dangerous to my long-term health.”

When he had to pull out of the first fight, against then-champion Benson Henderson, Grant said, that was the toughest.

“This latest one [against Anthony Pettis], it was just hanging around and it’s been three months, so I just wanted to take the time and heal up,” Grant said. “When they offered the fight for Dec. 14, I just knew I’m not ready. Maybe in a month I’ll be 100 percent healed. But also, I haven’t been on the mats for three months. There’s just too much unknown to be able to commit.”

And so, for now, he waits. Every day sees him get a little closer to recovery. These days, Grant said, he suffers from “a little fogginess, a mild headache, but I’m getting there.”

While there might be plenty of others who would like to rush him back into the cage, he’s content to take his time. You only get one brain in this life, after all. Now that Grant knows what it’s like when something goes wrong with his, he said, “I want to be as careful as possible.”

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